Frustraturbation

I had begun writing a list of trivial things that annoy me (for no good reason) because that is the sort of person I am.

1. Parsley.
2. Asymmetry.
3. Mustaches.
4. Red hair.
5. Loose collars.
6. Loose ties.
7. Loose morals.
8. Loose faucets.

I was still calm. I wanted to dissect a little deeper into my shallowness. I started a new list.

1. Surgeons.
2. 'Sontimeter.'
3. Starting sentences with 'basically.'
4. 'Aks.'
5. Uninformed use of vernacular.

A little twitch started in my right little finger. This normally happens when I get worked up, drink coffee, or play a video game that I don't like just to reassert my juvenile masculinity and check that my testosterone still works.

I wanted more than just a twitch. I wanted sweat, palpitations, heartburn, and aching tension in my shoulders and lower back. I wanted neurological mayhem, tsunamis of dopamine ravaging my basal nuclei, inappropriately frantic and useless messages telling my brain to do inappropriately frantic and useless things with my muscles. And pain.

And so there came into being a new list. A terrible list. A list to end all lists, to line up the other lists against a wall and shoot them in the head.

1. Irresponsibly executed linguistic maneuvers--these include poor syntax, inappropriate idioms, and incorrect use of plural forms when the singular is intended and vice versa.

What started out as item #1, 'irresponsibly executed linguistic maneuvers,' quickly ballooned into a worryingly elitist tirade against the marginally educated masses who take language for granted:

As untrained as novice swordsmen, they brandish diction clumsily and with disregard for its sharp edges, its elegance, and the potential power it affords when executed with even just moderate skill.

These are the people who stir immiscible metaphors together like drunken chefs. They stagger around their prose like saturated winoes, trying to bring one end of an idiom towards the other and missing their mark completely. Instead of respecting the gravity of language and treading lightly but purposefully, they bumptiously bang words together like cavemen trying to make fire by trial and mostly error.

You might be one of these people. Do you know the difference between 'He only cuts wood' and 'He cuts only wood'? Do you say 'criteria' when you mean to say 'criterion'? How about 'phenomena'--have you any idea how to properly use this word without hurting yourself? Sometimes there is one 'auditorium,' but there may also be two 'auditoria.' I'm not even going to mention 'data' and 'media,' but I just did because I am annoyed and feeling so good right now.

Do you say 'comprises of,' 'myriad of,' or 'bored of'? Do you mistake 'advise' for 'advice' (and vice versa)? Do you eat 'brussel sprouts'? Do you wait 'as time progresses'? Do you 'take a different tact'? Do you not know how to spell 'ad nauseam'? Do you do things 'as best as' you can? Do you post 'quotes'?

You might as well be dipping your quill in poop and scribbling your silly letters directly onto your underpants.

Why am I so worked up about this? It's for absolutely no reason at all, which is far more reason than I need. Frustration is at the heart of ecstasy. The doubtful anticipation of climax is the heightening of the sensorium, the hypnotic progressive blurring of whatever once distinguished bliss from pain. As emotions flurry--love, hate, anger, pleasure--they all become shadows of each other as we speed down (or up) the oily asymptotic ramp that promises everything but delivers nothing, faster and faster, slower and slower.

I'm so frustrated that I don't know what I'm talking about anymore. Oh, yes!

Oh, by the way, all of this was in an English accent.

Haatem's special sauce

Take these things:

1. Two or more 1.5-inch thick sirloin slabs (assuming you have friends or a partner of some sort, otherwise you can just have one for your lonely sad self if you like being lonely and sad and by yourself, I mean that's ok too, but you might find it more efficient to just nuke some gruel and stir in some tears)
2. One handful of peppercorns
3. One gentle peppercorn-caressing-to-death device
4. One red pepper hull and one green pepper hull (having been tucked into an olive oil and garlic bath for at least one night)
5. Haatem's special sauce (pi tablespoons of olive oil, pi-1 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, a dwarf's fistful of cracked black pepper, one tablespoon of minced garlic, one pseudopinch of cayenne pepper--more if you're not afraid--1/2 chopped onion, the same amount of sugar you can hold within the diamond-shaped compartment formed by bringing four fingers together at the tips, then another two of those, the finely chopped olive oil-soaked peppers mentioned above, two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, one half teaspoon of dry mustard, as many drops of Wright's Liquid Smoke as the number of times you've set your hair on fire and enjoyed it--or two works also)
6. Grilling apparatus (flammables, inflammables, and nonflammables)
7. Other comestibles and accoutrements
8. Libations (I'm a fan of Virgil's)
9. A t-shirt that reads, 'Nobody likes a vegetarian'
10. Other people

And do this:

1. Log out and go outside.

Favorite words

#1. Juice.

Say it. Juice. Say it. Say it. Is there a better word? I submit that there is not. Juice. It's practical. Who doesn't like juice? Unloved-middle-child-immoral-sociopath-backstabbing-blasphemous-no-heart-having-hater-being-limited-wit-dry-mouthed-type people, that's who.

Juice is sensual. Bathe it with some saliva and caress each letter with your tongue. Jjj. Ooo. Oh. Oooooooossssss. Cradle it. Let it tickle your lips. Taste it.

Besides the viscous-warm tenderness I feel dripping down my hair, face, and neck, teasing things that I like to get teased every time I say 'juice,' juice also happens to be the fluid of life. It is by the wisdom of God that there is some kind of juice inside every living thing and also in some inanimate things. That we happened to give the divine solution a name that electrifies my spine is pure serendipity. It is, therefore, my number one favorite word of all time. Ever. For now.

If you don't like juice, you are disrespecting the Lord.

Sometimes a phallus is just a phallus

Psychiatry is a field that makes sense in the sense that if you have any sense (in the sense that you are sensible) you will find it difficult to make any sense of it. My feeling is that there is a nearly invisible boundary between effectively mapping out the currents deep in the id and prancing about at the shallow end of the ego, unless you can't swim.

Where do you look for meaning in relationships with people? Can a label that one uses to define a relationship be simply a preemptive defense of that relationship? I mean, saying 'we're married' is clear and in any case more an apology to one's tamed and beaten demons than anything else. But what about relationships that can be approached in an accusatory way? So-called platonic relationships, for example. If you have to specifically preface a friendship with 'platonic,' then is it really platonic? Psychoanalysts make phallic balloon animals out of unsuspecting platonists. True, sometimes an apple is just an apple, but that's so uninteresting. (Even a granny smith is mildly tantalizing at best, compared to a shiny green boob with a stem that grows on trees and tastes so sourly delicious.)

Enough psychobabble. I like the stuff and appreciate it, but I'm not creative enough to whip up a la carte syllogisms around a patient and still be composed enough to fill out the invoice with a straight face. Another feature of the inpatient psychiatric experience that has struck me is the staggering degree of impairment with which some psychotic patients have to live. I don't know what I would do without reality. Well, reality is reality, and what we experience is what we experience, and it is nothing if it does not depend on the sartrean cogito's automatic comprehension of existence--the human-reality at once creating and created by the juxtaposition of l'etre and le neant.

Saying that kind of crap without smoking a cigarette just looks and sounds stupid and I have the most delicate pink little lungs. Whether or not experience and reality are the same shouldn't make any difference to us, social interactions notwithstanding. If this is a blue ball, but I see a pair of orange galloshes, it's still my experience and its accuracy is irrelevant even though I am laughed at by my peers for stumbling around in the rain trying to balance myself on a blue ball like a clowning sad kierkegaardian lunatic full of anguish and pneumonia. So I suppose reality is not as important to me as I thought. Who's to say that I experience reality anyway except me? You can say I'm crazy but then I can say I know you are but what am I times infinity times infinity plus one squared to the power of you're stupid! In fact, I renounce reality. A bas la realite!

Alright enough of that nonsense.

Paranoia, on the other hand, is truly debilitating. Voices, hallucinations, the government melting your ice cream on purpose via satellite. So maybe reality is a good thing after all. But if my brain were forced to choose between a reality that really bites on the one hand and a Statler and Waldorf commentary trained with deadly aim on my inadequacies on the other, maybe I'd take the two grumpy old beans rather than the haldol. Of course, if I'm up in the balcony with them and they're telling me to jump off in that endearingly funny gruff heckling tone of theirs, I hope I'd reconsider or call for Dr. Bunsen's help. Yes I know he's a PhD, but who else am I going to call, the green frog? That's crazy.

Speaking of haldol, my tic has been out of control over the past few days and my neck, shoulder, and wrist are quite sore. Antipsychotics are good for mental psychosis as well as somatic psychosis but oh so bad for your liver.

Paradoxically, however, this is a sentence for which the word 'paradoxically' was completely unnecessary. But what discussion of psychiatry--no matter how half-baked--is complete without 'paradoxically'? In my next post, my judgement may improve but I will always lack insight.

Domo arigato Mr. Moschino

I've got a secret I've been hiding under my coat. I starve my brain for blood every morning using a 100% silk Versace noose that is home to a delicate menagerie of biological opportunistic bastards (of the highest caliber) that I've collected during my travels through other people's nasty bits. My dilemma is this: how do I look presentable, and yet demand more of this season's catalog by not killing people who touch me?

I have considered the collarless shirt. Elegant, simple, no WMDs, and quite frankly, sexy. And I'm nothing if I'm not a sexy son of a blastula. But my neck is half a meter long and a size 14 1/2, so the collarless shirt makes me look like a closed tufted umbrella with an Adam's apple. Still sexy, but come on, add 1 crucifix and stir and I'm Father Late-for-Baptism. (Yes, of course the shirt will be black. That's how I roll.)

The bowtie. A timeless accoutrement that is as infused with suave lightness as it is heavy with brainiosity. Each bowtie comes with a spray bottle of 10 extra IQ points applied straight up the nose where you can smell the ideas.

No, the bowtie is not really timeless, rather wherever it goes it drapes everything within 2 meters of its frilly ends with a thin dusty coat of 1925 and a nice lacquer of pre-depression art-deco Gatsbitude (you're not going to get this stuff anywhere else, I speak a quaint dialect of northern arse, 3, 2, 1, never mind).

The bowtie offers the dull shirt an opportunity to charleston its way into the limelight. That might make the shirt yellow and accentuate my sweat stains (which are almost as sexy as my remarkably toneless ass) but every day wearing a bowtie is a day of greatness and respect.

Certainly the bowtie is more difficult to weaponize.

There is a simpler option. If Yossarian can get a medal pinned to his naked chest in wartime, I could certainly get used to the feel of stethoscope rubber around my bare neck and pens tegadermed to my chest hair.

You know what else is timeless? Styx.

The problem's plain to see/
Too much technology/
Machines to save our lives/
Machines dehumanize.

This of course makes so much more sense if you take out all these words and add different words that are more relevant. Actually I just like this song because I'm old skool and I kick it like hitops in 1983.

And I found a Moschino bowtie that matches my chest hair. Domo arigato, Mr. Moschino.

The happy place

The morgue under our hospital looks just like a morgue.

The long hallway smells of wet dog like it's supposed to. A quorum of aproned antisocial types with knives stand around like chefs. Jars and plastic buckets full of pieces of humans neatly line the walls like barrels in a candy store. In the corner, a table with a camera rig and lights is set up for photographing specimens against an ugly blue background like on a porno set. Dull metal autopsy tables with cutting boards straight out of Martha Stewart's kitchen take up most of the space, separated by stretches of nasty green tile like in grandma's bathroom. A light box for radiology films hangs on one wall with an old stereo from 1986 on top of it (dual tape deck, one with auto-reverse, the other not so lucky) with an actual tape inside, also like in grandma's bathroom. And in the corner, also like in grandma's bathroom, a toilet.

I know, for that is what I also thought. But nay. It was a toilet.

This was not your grandma's toilet. I walked over to it for a closer look and no, it wasn't a sink or a basin, it was just a toilet. But something didn't look right. I looked at it for a while and went down the list of essential criteria for toiletness. There was a toilet plunger. There was a toilet flush lever thing. The piping looked appropriate to me. At its heart was a bowl with toilet water. The rim was there, though I wouldn't want to touch it. In the bottom of the bowl was the sine qua non of toiletude: the drain of oblivion.

Still, something was off. So I imagined myself going through the motions of using this toilet to discover what was missing and promptly ended the imagination when I got totally wet and cold and grossed out. This toilet was way too big for humans.

My colleague was standing next to me and noticed that I was staring at the toilet busy with my calculations. She leaned over and whispered, 'This looks like a good place to shoot Saw 4.' That's grim.

On the other hand, the morgue is actually the least grim place in the hospital since nobody actually dies here. In the tape deck: 'Bhangra mix 94.' Who cares what the toilet is for? Party in the basement, yar.

The pouch of Reda

A word about the title of this blog. This is the story of Reda's pouch. It is an anatomical pouch that I claimed one day while dissecting a cadaver. It is not a pleasant pouch, but it carried a generic and quite replaceable nomenclature and I could not resist but to strip it of its genericity and apply my own eponym to infuse it with life and especially vanity.

Specifically, Reda's pouch (also known as the pouch of Reda) is the compartment created by the interface between the uterus and the urinary bladder. An unfortunate location, but I was disappointed to find that the narrow communication between the third and fourth ventricles (that I had coveted so much since my youth) had already been snatched up and out of my reach forever by that half-wit Sylvius a few hundred years ago. Clearly, I far surpass this moldy ignoramus in medical knowledge at this point yet he still gets to keep his stupid aqueduct. His name contaminates several miscellaneous desirable sites in the human body (all highly lucrative real estate and some so elegant and ethereal that his audacity--and begrudgingly, deftness--in even trying to get his name to stick shocks me to no end). A fissure. My fissure.

Standing over me sprinkling salt on my wounds was Magendie, who filched my foramen while Treitz and Oddi ganged up on me and wrenched the duodenum from my fists and spat on my ligament and sphincter with their gross acidy eighteenth century spit to claim them for themselves.

No. I am left with a pouch that can be found in less than half of the population, and even so, is absolutely useless. It is there by accident, an anatomical default, the unavoidable and purposeless outcome of space and tissue. A dank, reeking swamp, a sewer for the female inards, a tripe basket!

That is what I, bloodied and defeated, was able to wrestle away from those entitled buffoons. And even so my claim is still disputed. The best I can get is 'the vesicouterine pouch' and then in pen and in my own handwriting: 'of Reda.'